Technology produces racial bias without any intending racist

Evidence

Atlanta, Georgia. He received no soap. He assumed it was not working—until his White friend, Larry, used the same dispenser and found that it worked properly. Several additional attempts revealed that the dispenser was indeed discriminatory. It would work properly for white hands but would not dispense soap for the hands of Black people. … Was the soap machine biased? No one contended that engineers intentionally used technology that favored Whites over Blacks, and no one believed that the Marriott intended to make it difficult for Blacks to wash their hands. Nonetheless, Mr. Fitzpatrick could not wash his hands, and his White friend could. The soap machine was functionally biased. As it turned out, the dispenser was using near-infrared technology, which requires that hands presented to receive soap reflect light back to the sensor. Hands with darker skin pigments reflect less light, and so the dispenser failed to work for most Black individuals (Plenke, 2015). This is not bias in the sense of racial animus, but it does reflect an important fact: technology, in its various and multiple instantiations, is bound by rules. Those rules, inadvertently or not, can be applied equally to all and still produce unfair outcomes. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 1144

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core interest in whether measured bias diverges from professed/sincere conviction—the dispenser is an extreme case where animus is literally absent yet functional discrimination is real.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the ‘sincere-conviction-vs-measured-bias gap’ theme by showing a bias mechanism that operates without any actor holding a bias.
• SEED: The soap dispenser as a species of ‘negative space racism’—bias that arises in the absence of any biased person, useful for an essay on algorithmic fairness as distinct from human prejudice.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 1144